"it should be punished in the same way no matter the classification of the victim"

Hate crime legislation does not protect people based on "the classification of the victim". It protects everyone equally.

Maybe you missed it, but David Neiwert pointed this out in one of the quotes I pasted above.[1]

  None of these laws specify the race or ethnicity or religion
  of the victims -- rather, they are focused solely on the
  motivations of the perpetrator. A person need not be actually
  gay to be the victim of a gay-bashing hate crime; he need only
  have been perceived as gay by someone who specifically set out
  to assault homosexuals. This is only logical, since the
  terroristic motivation of the assault is present in either
  case.

  Moreover, the laws protect everyone equally. Majority whites
  are victims of bias crimes too, and every year there are over
  a thousand prosecutions for such cases. (Indeed, the
  definitive Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, involved
  a black man accused of fomenting a hate crime against a couple
  of white teens.) Check the FBI statistics for yourself.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5622339

That is bunk, plain and simple. A crime against an accepted classification will get more play than one without. Look at the discussion on college admissions and Asian students to see how unfair this stuff is in real life. Anytime you venture too far into subjective criteria over objective leads to serious trouble.